It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
Interpretation
The destruction of a library leads to a more powerful legacy of banned knowledge.
Alberto Manguel's quote reflects on the paradox that while libraries may be destroyed or censored, the knowledge and ideas they contain will persist and often become even more influential. Each act of censorship only serves to amplify the voices of those who were silenced, creating a stronger presence of the ideas that were attempted to be suppressed.
In practice
In a speech advocating for free access to information, one might say, 'As Alberto Manguel noted, the destruction of a library only fuels the fire of suppressed ideas.'
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
Do our children now have to choose between getting an education and dying? Some of us cannot move on and accept that kind of society.
One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
... there is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been taught.
Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
I became a journalist because I didn't want to have to rely on the press for information... I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it's useful to know what people think is the news.
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